My favorite photos from Canada and how I took them

Canada was such a fun trip and I was able to capture some great photos. The one above is one I'm very proud of. This photo has been featured in a few art galleries around the world so I'm very proud of it. To take a photo like this is actually really easy and it's one of my favorite techniques to use. This type of photography is called Long Exposure Photography and it's best done at night. To do this you definitely want a tripod or everything will end up super blurry. The settings for this the shutter speed has to be super slow down to even a minute or so long. Having the shutter speed open this long will keep your subject in focus since it's not moving and everything around it will either disappear or turn into streaks of light like in my photo. If you notice in my photo the lights around the light post look a little different and this is a outcome of the light bouncing and reflecting at the many cars that drove by, which makes a cool and unique look to the photo. If I could do anything differently I probably would've moved to the right more (or maybe cropped it differently) but I remember this night was super busy on the sidewalk and I was walking back to my car to leave when I decided to stop and take this.

This photo is a close up of the Gastown Steam Clock in Vancouver Canada. Very cool to see this clock in action and to be able to take photos of it with not a lot of people around surprisingly. I love architecture and so that is what I usually photograph. And sometimes their are fun surprises in these photos. First off the build of this clock is really pretty and I wanted to capture the inside of it as well. I never look at my photos after I take them I only look when I am editing so I didn't know I wasn't able to get the inside. In college I took a photography class with an amazing professor that taught me how to properly use my camera settings and look at the hidden things in my photos since I liked doing cities. Because of that advice I was able to see that I got this traffic sign in the reflection of the clock which is really cool. I love shots like this because it shows life going on around your subject. The first time I was able to do this was in college and I was taking photos of my car and in the reflection of my windows I got the Church of Jesus Christ's temple. It was a cool shot and I'm glad I was able to get that experience to be able to find it in this photo. What would I do differently? Get the entire clock in the shot, I think that would've looked even cooler.

This photo was also taken in Vancouver, I can't remember exactly where in Vancouver. Something about this photo is just so satisfying to me. To take this I simply listened to the settings of my camera. My favorite tool on cameras is the little bar scale thing at the bottom of the screen. I has an arrow showing you how close to perfect shutter speed you are at. I most of the time shoot with that arrow perfectly in the middle, sometimes changing ISO to get it to look where I want but usually around 800. With a picture like this I didn't put that arrow in the middle. I like really dark but defined photos so sometimes I change the shutter speed to make the photo darker. I feel like it gives a good ambiance to the photo. What I would differently is again be more centered between the two buildings but I bet that would've been the middle of the street.

Hope you enjoyed hearing my techniques and photos!